Thursday, January 05, 2006

Obituaries are being prepped, knives honed and mourning clothes ironed.

All for a man who exerts as much magnetism on his likely deathbed as he did for a nation still in the process of defining it's identity.

Ariel Sharon may have been a monster or a leader of men, but he was able to embrace paradigm shifts like few leaders have done - shifts that meant the sacrificing of sacred positions as well as the aggression of neighbors to hold fast a dream. The imprisonment of Yasser Arafat may have hastened his end, or it might have been merely the fading of a generation. What lies ahead is as hard to predict as what went before, were one to travel back in time to the birth of the Israeli nation.

The steersman is away from his tiller.The hyenas are laughing their sinister songThe desert is silent and darkThe old men are encircled in their secret councilsArik is in his winter retreatA winter after his enemy went to the sunset land